saying goodbye

Every year one of the national television stations creates a montage of pictures and sets it to music…about all the actors, directors, and assorted television and movie people who have died during the year.

And every year I am shocked by a few of the people that have passed on to their “rewards”.

Mary Tyler Moore died this year

.

I didn’t know that. How could I miss that? She was someone that I grew up watching on the television and admired her. Heck, I wanted to BE her when I was a teen.

And Robert Hardy……dang,…okay so a lot of Americans won’t know Mr. Hardy unless they watched a lot of PBS but I knew his work from the time I was very small. He was my favorite British vet…that is veterinarian not veteran…on All Creatures Great and Small…my favorite book as a child. He was King Lear, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. He was even in the Harry Potter films! I never saw them, but I know he was in them. He shall be missed.

And I found out this morning that my first movie star crush where I thought I would DIE if I didn’t get to meet him and talk to him and marry him and give him children….can we just say obsessed?

Boy, did he EVER have The Right Stuff! I first saw him in a play…La Tourista in NYC..I am pretty sure it was 1967. It was about that most insidious tourist disease…well, condition…DIARRHEA……I laughed until I cried. I actually got to meet the cast as my cousins whom I was residing at the time were both actors. We went backstage and Mr Shephard SHOOK MY HAND! I was in Heaven after that…….to be so young again!

These were the ones that made the largest impression on me…and I will feel a little bit of sadness from now on whenever I see a movie they were in or an old television show.